Who pays Seatcount, and who does not
Six of the seven CRMs priced here can pay this site a commission. Salesforce cannot and never will be linked for one. Free tiers pay nothing and are recommended anyway. The whole arrangement, in writing.
How Seatcount is paid
A minority of the links here are partner links, and the rest are not. If you open one of the marked ones and later subscribe, that vendor may pay Seatcount a share of what you spend. It costs you nothing different, and it changes nothing about the figures: every price here is copied from the vendor's own page whether or not there is a commission attached to it.
Partner links are marked in two ways that are visible in the page source as well as on screen. They point at a /go/ address on this domain rather than at a vendor, and they carry rel="sponsored nofollow" so search engines are told what they are. Search engines are also told not to crawl /go/ at all.
The six that can pay us
Six of the seven CRMs priced here run a partner programme this site can join: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, monday, Freshsales and Close. Each pays on a paid subscription, none pays on a free signup, and the rates differ — which is precisely why the rates are kept out of the editorial process.
Where a programme requires approval rather than a self-serve signup, the link still points at the vendor's own homepage until that approval exists. Nothing on this site depends on a commission arriving.
Salesforce: no programme, no link, no exception
Salesforce runs no publisher or affiliate programme at all — only AppExchange, consulting and reseller partnerships. It is priced here in full anyway, on the same terms as everything else, and every Salesforce link is a plain link with nothing attached.
That is a published refusal, not an oversight. Salesforce will not be given a /go/ key, and if a programme appears later this page will be rewritten before any link is.
Free tiers pay us nothing, and are still recommended
HubSpot's free tools for two users, Zoho CRM's free edition for three and Salesforce's Free Suite earn this site nothing whatever. HubSpot's programme pays on paid plans only; a free signup is worth zero.
They are still named as the right answer wherever they are the right answer, because a site about prices that steered readers away from $0 would be worthless. The same applies to any advice here that ends "do not upgrade yet".
What we refuse
- No discount codes or coupon blocks. Several of these programmes prohibit coupon placement outright, and a voucher panel is not price journalism. Where a vendor publishes a real saving — an annual rate, a limited-time offer — it is quoted as the vendor's own published price with the date, never as a code from us.
- No paid placements. No vendor can buy a position in a table, a mention, or a kinder sentence. None has been offered one.
- No bidding on vendor brand names. This site runs no paid search on any CRM's name.
- No sponsored posts, guest articles or link insertions. Those requests go unanswered.
- No self-referral. Nobody here signs up through these links.
How a commission is kept out of the editorial
The order of every table on this site is decided by a number — a price, a seat count, a fee — and never by a payout. Where two figures tie, the tie is broken alphabetically and the tie is stated.
The strongest check is structural: the charts are generated from the same price data as the tables beside them, and the build fails if the prose and the data disagree. There is no place in that pipeline where a commission could move a figure without breaking something.
Questions
If anything here looks like it was influenced by a payout, say so at [email protected] and it will be answered. The about page sets out how a price gets onto this site in the first place.